Whilst that travesty of a trial was going on, and every suggestion in favour of the accused was being trampled on, and every one of the chartered liars who had sworn falsely for the honour of the army was being bolstered by the authority of the court, I had many opportunities for conversation with Zola, and in the course of one of them, he offered me an almost passionate justification of his literary methods. He did not complain, he said, that he had been misunderstood; he had been charged with being a pornographist and with revelling in filth and horror for their own sake. “It is not so,” he declared, “but look you! I love and revere this beautiful and noble France, and I believe that she has yet a splendid destiny before her. At this moment she seems to lie dead and drowned beneath a river of lies, but she will yet revive and justify herself. I picture her,” he went on, marching up and down the room, “as a great suffering angel stricken down by a disease which only a cruel cautery can cure. It has been the aim and effort of my life to apply that cautery, and if I am fated to be remembered in the future, the future will do me justice.” All this left me as far as ever from an approval of the methods he defended, but it was absolutely impossible to doubt his sincerity.
Two English journalists, who were at that time resident in Paris and who felt strongly at the time that the notorious Major Esterhazy was a much maligned and injured man, engineered an interview between him and myself. The major, it appeared, was extremely anxious to be rightly understood by the British public. He complained that on several occasions he had consented to be interviewed by the London Press and that in each case his statements had been maliciously distorted. He asked me if I would represent him truly and would allow him to tell his story without comment. I made the promise and, of course, I kept it, but as a matter of fact he had no case to offer. He described the general staff of the French army as un tas de scélérats, and he alleged that he had been hounded down by his enemies and betrayed by those who had pretended to be his friends. As he talked he leant forward in his chair, tapping the parquet nervously with his walking-stick, and every now and then sending a curiously furtive glance in my direction, for all the world as if he were asking in his own mind: “Have you found me out yet?” “I would ask nothing better,” he told me, “than to put myself at the head of my regiment and to march my men through Paris, and to shoot down every Jew who lives in it. I would shoot them down like rabbits, 'sans rancune et sans remords.'” He flashed that strange furtive glance at me and took his walking-stick in both hands: “I have a dream,” he went on, “it comes to me often. I see myself in a room where the walls are white and the ceiling is white and the floor is white, and all my enemies are there before me. I rush amongst them with this stick only and I strike, and I strike, and I strike until the walls are red and the ceiling is red and the floor is red. Ah! I shall have my turn one day.” I wired all this meaningless farrago to the Daily News that night, but with much more nonsense to the same effect, and on the following day it was all duly printed. I mention this little fact for a reason. In M. Anatole France's novel, L'Anneau d'Améthyste, which appeared much later than the account of my interview with Esterhazy, a character is introduced who talks precisely in that gentleman's manner and who, amongst other things, relates that identical dream; from which one gathers that he must have told it more than once. It was most probably a habit of his, for all his phrases had a manufactured air, and he seemed much more like an actor reciting a familiar part than as if he spoke on the spur of the moment. Later on, as everybody knows, he sold a confession in which he proclaimed himself the author of the Bordereau. Later still he repudiated the confession, though by that time there was no doubt in any sane man's mind that it was true. So long as the affaire Dreyfus is remembered, Esterhazy will in all likelihood be regarded as a villain of the very deepest dye; but so far as I can make him out, he suffered merely from a total absence of moral and mental responsibility. He seems really to have persuaded himself that he was an ill-used man, and until circumstances became too strong for him, to have acted in accordance with his own queer code of honour.
I have listened to many 'great speakers in my time, but never to one who displayed such fire and force and fluency and so wide an emotional range as Maître Labori. When he arose to address the jury for the defence, he seemed to hurl himself into his subject with every fibre of soul and body. He gesticulated with all the vehemence of a man engaged in a deadly bout with the rapier, and the impetuous torrent of his speech dashed on as if nothing could arrest it. I remember thinking to myself that twenty minutes of this would bring him to the limit of his forces, but he went on for hours, as if he were incapable of fatigue. At one point of his speech he used the words: “Un héros comme Zola.” There were some two hundred privileged spectators of the scene, all squeezed into a sort of pen at the extreme end of the court, and nearly everyone of them held a latchkey in readiness, so that he might whistle down it if the orator afforded any opportunity for derision. A shrill scream of sound rose as Labori uttered the words. He paused and faced squarely round upon his interrupters, turning his back on the tribunal. The clamour lasted for a minute and then died away, and then with a cold incisiveness, in strange contrast with his previous manner, he addressed the crowd. “I repeat the phrase—a hero like Zola. I tell you that his courage, his honesty and his devotion will be held in reverence by his countrymen long after you have sunk into your unremembered and unhonoured graves.” He towered there in silence for a full half minute and there was not so much as a murmur of reply. “Eh bien!” he said, “je résume,” and turning round to the tribunal he took up his speech at the point at which it had been arrested. The rebuke was enough; he was interrupted no more.
Zola read a statement in his own defence and was in a condition of pitiable nervous agitation from the beginning of it to the end. The foolscap pages he held in his hand quivered as if they were stirred by the hot air rising from a stove, and in his anxiety to be heard throughout the court he pitched his voice too high. In the middle of his address it cracked harshly and the packed crowd at the end of the court broke into derisive laughter. He too turned upon the scoffers, but not as Labori had done before him. He was not on his own ground as the great advocate had been, and he seemed to search for words that would not come. The incident, however, seemed to brace him for a while and for a minute or two he read in a firmer tone, though that pathetic tremor of the papers he held still went on and sometimes seemed to make it difficult for him to read.
When at last the tragic farce was over, the foregone conclusion arrived at and the sentence of fine and imprisonment pronounced, I found Zola alone at home in a state of profound dejection. “I don't pity myself,” he said. “I am not to be pitied but this poor France, ce pauvre France.” He returned to the words again and again. “I thought,” he said, “that one had only to light the torch of Truth and to throw it into that pit of darkness to make everything clear, but they have stifled the flame with lies. It is finished, it is all finished.” I ventured to tell him that I could not and would not believe it, that the verdict of the Court of Cassation was the merest nothing in comparison with the verdict of the world which he had beyond doubt secured. France would come to reason yet. He refused to be cheered, and saying that he was in need of rest, bade me goodnight dispiritedly and went to bed. Now that the trial was over I had no further business to detain me in Paris, but I saw him by appointment next day before I left for London. He was in full fighting trim again. “We shall do something yet,” he said; “despair wins no battles and there are still honest men in France.” I made a farewell call on Maître Labori and found him so husky that he could barely speak, but he poured scorn on the idea that he had worn his voice by the prodigious effort of that sustained relation. He had been so imprudent as to drive home in the humid air of a January evening and he had caught a cold. For his own part he was quite sanguine of ultimate success—not sanguine only, but assured. “We shall win yet,” he prophesied confidently. “No cause ever failed in the long run which had such an array of truth behind it.” He might well have added that no cause ever succeeded which had behind it such a battalion of lies and liars as was ranked upon the other side.
CHAPTER XVI
A Few Letters—J. M. Barrie—George Meredith—Advice on
Going to America—A Statue to Washington—Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.—Robert
Louis Stevenson—Mr Edmund Gosse on the Neo-Scottish School—
My Contemporaries in Fiction—Sir A. Conan Doyle—Mr.
Joseph Hocking—Robert Buchanan—Mr. E. Marshall Hall, K.C.
